Just watched the end of the Mets’ 3-1 loss to the Nationals.

I’ve never seen a team, like Washington, with so many players who do the exact … same … thing. With some slight exceptions, Ronnie Belliard, Nick Johnson, Austin Kearns and Josh Willingham are all one person.

And yet, they still kill the Myets.

If I had to spend one day in any spot in the world, I’d probably pick Union Square Park in Manhattan. I loooooove Union Square Park, and if you haven’t been there—go. Seriously.

Was just walking around for the past hour, and there’s nowhere else quite like it. Hemp salesmen next to breakdancers next to panhandlers next to cookie salesmen. There are seemingly always teenagers hanging around, smoking cigarettes, kissing, comparing tattoos. Tourists come, too, but not all that many. The place has a true air of New York City authenticity.

Come to think of it, in the aftermath of 9/11, when the wife (then-girlfriend) and I lived on 15th and Third, I spent a ton of time at the park, observing vigils, signing memorials, listening to arguments and preaching and cries for reason. At the time, the park was littered with pamphlets of the missing. A haunting place—truly haunting.

Anyhow, tonight I stood for about 45 minutes and listened to a kid preaching the Bible. He was 20-years old, white, with scraggly brown hair and a small goatee. He wore dark blue jeans, a green collared shirt and black sandals, and held a copy of The Word beneath his armpit. As he spoke of redemption and salvation; of avoiding temptation and of the 10 Commandments, a singular thought reverberated through my head: What the hell does this kid know?

He told the story of his car accident, when his vehicle spun three times and he felt angels watching over him. I thought, once again, about 9.11, and how there were no angels watching over the 3,000 plus. He told the story of God having a plan for everyone. I thought of my great aunt, Ann Goldstein, dying at age 10. He told us all that there’s only one way to eternal salvation, and it comes with accepting Jesus into your heart. I thought of my wife, a Jewish social worker who has dedicated her life to helping people. Not for money, not for fame, not for salvation—merely because it’s the right thing to do.

Twenty … years … old.

Immediately after writing the previous post, it was brought to my attention that yesterday’s New York Post actually ran some of the stills of a nude Erin Andrews.

I have worked in this business for 15 years. I have taken on assignments that I’ve disagreed with. I’ve written stories I haven’t always felt 100-percent comfortable with. I’ve seen the media sink to some incredible lows. But this … this is the absolute worst. Seriously, the worst ever.

Sans irony, Andy Soltis, a Post writer (who should be ashamed for accepting this assignment), began his story with:

Sexy ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews was the target of a peephole pervert who surreptitiously shot a video of her walking around her hotel room naked — and posted it on the Internet. The sideline siren wants the creepy cameraman brought to justice, both for herself and to keep other victims from having to go through the same nightmare.

I hate the Post. I’ve always hated the Post. I think it’s a pathetic, juvenile, worthless piece of hardened dog s%$#, best served as toilet-side resting place for excrement-encased plungers. Now, I hate it even more. In any other world, someone gets fired over this.

At the Post, someone gets a raise.

* Out of respect to Andrews and disrespect to the worst newspaper in the history of the world, I’m not linking to the story/images.

So a few days have passed since the whole Erin Andrews nude video flare-up, which is good. Because I’ve been trying, trying, trying, trying to decide what I think about the whole thing.

I’ve decided.

First and foremost, I’m disgusted. There is nothing funny, sexy, goofy, wacky, fun about taping a naked woman as she changes clothes through a peephole in a hotel. I hope they find the guy, I hope they coat his body in cheese and I hope they dangle him before a gaggle of over-sized rats.

There is, however, a greater issue here. Greater issues, actually. With rare exception, over the past decade ESPN (as well as other networks) has decided upon a rather unscientific (but not entirely universal) system for hiring its female sideline reporters and studio personalities.

A. They must have a working knowledge of sports.

B. They must speak English.

C. They must be “hot.”

For the record, I loathe the word “hot” as a description of attractive women. It’s a pathetic, fourth-grade sort of term. Once upon a time I thought Corrine Lee was “hot.” We were, however, both in sixth grade at Lakeview Elementary, and she was probably wearing braces, leg warmers and Sassons. In the world of male-dominated sports media, however , “hot” remains the adjective of choice—2009 style. It comes with a very explicit, definitive meaning—blonde, large breasts, long legs. Over the course of my career I’ve heard countless female peers tagged as “hot” by looming, foaming, sloppily dressed men, and I’m always mortified to be a part of the conversation. (My lowest moment, easily: Being in a spring training press box with Warren Cromartie, the one-time Expos star who was working for some local radio station. When a female radio reporter, no older than 23, walked away, he turned to a young colleague and uttered something along the lines of, “I bet you’d like to tap that ass, eh?”).

Hence, we have been presented with “talents” (the in-house ESPN word to describe its relatively talent-less employees) like Erin Andrews, Melissa Stark, Lisa Guerrero, Jill Arrington and Jillian Barberie-Reynolds. This is not meant to insult those women, per se, but to suggest that, across America, there are, without question, hundreds … probably thousands of more capable females who possess greater doses of depth, insight, intelligence—but who are too physically __________ (FILL IN THE BLANK WITH ‘FAT, SHORT, FLAT-CHESTED, DEEP-VOICED, HAIRY, PIMPLED, SCARRED, ETC’ …) to be considered. Truth is, ESPN knows the two (pathetic) realities of hiring women to work the sidelines and clubhouses: 1. Male athletes will always ignore male reporters in favor of the scent of perfume and a pair of long legs; 2. Male viewers will always ignore male reporters in favor of the sight of perky breasts and a pair of long legs.

When it comes to her job, which—if a reminder is needed—is as an on-air sports reporter, Andrews is OK. Not amazing. Not terrible. Just OK. Yet during her time with ESPN, she has been branded as anything but a journalist—by viewers, as well as the network itself. Countless magazines and websites have deemed her “hottest” reporter or sports personality. If you Google her name (which results in more than 10 million sites), two of the first four pictures that pop up are close-ups of her breasts and rear end. Yet I have never—never—heard anyone from ESPN’s offices criticize the response to Andrews, or insist that she deserves credit, first and foremost, as a reporter, or that the days of treating her as an object should end. The truth is, every time someone Googles “Erin Andrews” and “ass,” ESPN is getting attention. And, as we all know, ESPN loves attention—good, bad or indifferent.

Once again, the person who taped Erin Andrews should be asked to star in a new VH1 reality show, LOCKED IN A ROOM WITH FLAVOR FLAV AND 20 STARVED ALLIGATORS. But as everyone in the media—and everyone at ESPN—feigns disgust over the way Andrews has been treated, some people need to look in the mirror.

There are, after all, consequences to creating a sex symbol.

Real consequences.

I graduated from college in 1994. Through the ensuing years, I’ve worked alongside some of the great writers of our era. Rick Reilly. Steve Rushin. Leigh Montville. Mark Kriegel. Jon Wertheim. On and on and on.

Yet as time has passed, I’ve clung to the belief that the best lede I’ve ever read—perhaps the best lede ever written—was done by a University of Delaware college student during my tenure as editor of our college paper, The Review.

I’ll never forget showing the lede to Catherine Mayhew, my first editor at The Tennessean, as I begged her to consider Greg Orlando for an internship in the summer of 1995. She read it, looked at me and said, “This is terrible. I have no idea what he’s talking about.” I disagreed then, and I disagree now. In newspaper, there’s this warped idea that the reader can’t be allowed to think too much; that if you don’t immediately get to the point, the customer will turn elsewhere. Like, say, TV.

Hogwash.

Great writing is inventive. It’s descriptive. It relies on myriad devices and follows few—if any—rules. That pretty much sums up why the following article, a review of the New Kids on the Block’s 1994 CD, Face The Music, maintains a prominent place in my journalistic scrapbook.

The scan didn’t come out so great. So here’s Greg’s lede:

•

By GREG ORLANDO/Copy Desk Chief

Somewhere in Asgard, Loki is screaming.

He has a right to, one supposes. The Aesir have bound him to a cavern, trapped forever like a fly in amber. From a hole in the ceiling, a steady stream of acid is dripping down, poised to strike the chaos bringer on his evil forehead.

His lovely wife Sigin is the only thing standing between the God of Mischief and mortal agony. She has a cup, you see, and catches the acid before it can hit.

Alas, the cup runneth over from time to time. When his wife goes to empty the container …

Somewhere in Delaware, I am screaming and there is nary a cup for miles.

The New Kids on The Block are back. Back after a three-year hiatus. Back to Face the Music.

A most heinous day of reckoning it is.

I can list the handful of writers who have truly inspired me throughout my career in journalism. Steve Buckley. Rick Telander. Steve Rushin. Dick Schaap. Dave Anderson. Mike Freeman. A couple of others. None, however, have had the impact of Greg Orlando, my former co-worker at the University of Delaware student newspaper and one of the best scribes I’ve ever seen.

Greg has worked for a handful of publications, primarily dealing with video games. He conducted the funniest Jason Giambi interview of all time (Question (feeling Giambi’s uniform): Is this thing velvet?), and once wrote an essay, “The Answer Man,” that continues to blow me away. Most important, he’s a good friend, and he’s agreed to contribute to jeffpearlman.com by taking one side in our weekly debate session. Today’s topic (selected by Greg): Vodka Drunkenski vs. the Industrial Revolution?

JEFF: As a boy growing up on the tough streets of Mahopac, N.Y., I had no life. The bullies picked on me. The teachers failed me. Rocks were thrown at my head with jarring regularity. In short, my life was equivalent to the hardened piece of snot permanently affixed to my nose.

Thank God for Vodka Drunkenski.

To simple, limited Gregory, Vodka was merely a video game character. But to me, he was everything. Vodka was the only person to come to my 13th birthday party. Vodka took me fishing. Vodka showed me how to woo a woman, and while his technique (Trip them, then offer a hand) was flawed, his intentions were all good. I still remember the time Vodka brought my 12 brothers and sisters to the movies. Yes, it was Teen Wolf Too. But he bought us popcorn. What a man.

The industrial revolution? Overrated.

Vodka? My friend and lover.

GREG: Toil and belching smoke and the soul-crushing oppression of the bourgeoisie: Truly this is the stuff of revolution.

We may laud Vodka Drunkenski. Certainly the man balanced the dual role of Russian boxing champion and alcoholic with great aplomb. Full well in time we may realize that his liver was actually built from living steel. As a man, unafraid, he was magnificent. As a statement for the promotion and advancement of the Soviet distillation industry, he was without peer.

Yet Drunkenski was no Industrial Revolution. He was Otto Von Bismarck’s blood and iron, but hardly a force to transform the world. Drunkenski could not, would never birth a hundred-thousand factories, or ten million oppressed waifs slaving away in dark, cramped, and unsafe conditions for 20-22 hours a day, six days a week and three-quarters of the day on Sunday.

The industrial revolution elevated squalor, disease, and despair to great heights. It was suffering for a new age of man, a scalding of the soul paving the way for our eventual overthrow and, God willing, enslavement by automatons, possibly with such cool-sounding names as the Crushmatic 8850 and the Stompinator 4425. And, when the time comes that we are all crushed beneath the gears of life’s cruel machinery, we may all stop for pause to thank the Industrial Revolution.

Should there be time, of course, of which there will be not.

So I was scanning sportsjournalists.com this morning (hey, I still like it) when I stumbled upon a link relating to a blog post by Clay Travis, a Nashville-based writer whose upcoming book I was asked to blurb (by a HarperCollins friend, not Clay himself). I don’t know Clay, but I read the book, thought it was solid, scribbled up a blurb, received a nice Thank You response, etc.

This is Clay’s blog post, and it is really, really, really, really, really, really off.

Again, I don’t know Clay. I certainly harbor no ill will. However, I must say …

A. If I’m about to release a book concerning University of Tennessee football, I might want to, ahem, hold my criticisms of The Tennessean (the state’s largest newspaper) until after the thing hits shelves.

B. The post shows a glaring lack of journalistic insight. In no particular order:

• Joe Biddle is a Tennessee institution and one hell of a nice man. I understand trying to be edgy, cool, hip whatever on a blog–but why take that kind of shot? What’s the purpose? This (”Joe Biddle, has not written an original idea in a decade. If he posted on fan message boards no one would read him. You can’t even accuse him of mailing in his columns, because that would mean he was willing to stand up from his desk and find a stamp.”) is purely mean. Not useful, not informative—just mean.

• “We all deserve to know the truth. Or as close to the truth as we can get.” Who says? Seriously, who says? A former NFL quarterback dies—reported. He is killed by his mistress—reported. He had other mistresses—reported. Why do we need an ongoing investigation into more and more and more women, until we find out McNair had 10 … 15 … 20 … 25 other women on the side? We’re not talking about a president, or a governor, or even a mayor. We’re not talking about someone whose personal life directly impacts society, or the immediate community. We’re talking about a retired football player who apparently had sex with a lot of women not named Mrs. McNair. I wouldn’t have blamed The Tennessean for running 800 follow-ups, but I certainly don’t blame them for deciding enough is enough.

• As a journalist, as well as a former Tennessean writer, I hate how the paper has cut back its travel for the UT and Vandy beats. Hate it. But Travis’ simplistic the-paper-has-gone-to-shit-and-here’s-the-best-example diatribe misses so much. The Tennessean started losing money around the time I left in the mid-to-late 1990s. Advertising has vanished, readership has plummeted, personals barely exist. It’s the all-too-common plights of papers everywhere. So, while it sucks that they don’t travel, there is a reality here: Newspapers are a business. And when business vanishes, expenses get slashed. There’s nothing simple about it; certainly nothing intentionally evil about it. And if anyone inside the newspaper deserves the blame, it’s not the editors—it’s the publisher.

In fact, the only area I agree with Travis is in his overall conclusion, which is that The Tennessean is a shell of yesteryear. I saw it upon my arrival in 1994. The publisher, Craig Moon (now with USA Today, I believed), carved a once-legendary product up and turned it into a sidebar machine. Everything was sidebar-sidebar-sidebar, nut-graph, nut-graph, nut-graph. Hard-hitting stories could only be so hard-hitting, because only a certain number of articles were allowed to jump to a different page (heaven forbid a reader lose interest!). The Tennessean kicked ass in the days of integration, and now it was relying on focus groups to decide whether we should be running more features than news stories; whether happy pieces were the way to go. A real bummer, no doubt, but alas … such is the newspaper world we live in.

And, for the record, I like Mrs. Cheap.

For the most part, I trust movie critics. If Ebert says Transformers 2 is a festering pile of dung, I believe him. If the New York Times pans Ice Age 2, I have no reason to think otherwise.

Hence, I started watching Will Smith’s Seven Pounds two nights ago with the lowest of expectations. After all, the reviews were dreadful. Beyond dreadful. “Seven Pounds feels like having Love Story and Beaches burnt onto your retinas in the style of A Clockwork Orange,” wrote someone from TotalFilm.com. Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times was even harsher—”(The film) compounds the schmaltz in a tale of goody-goody benefaction and glutinous redemption, whose plot the distributors mercifully injunct us from revealing. Enough to say that hearts are sundered and united on screen while churning stomachs in the auditorium are left to fend for themselves.”
So I watched.

And loooooooooooved it. Absolutely loved it.

Sure, the plot was grim. And uncomfortable. There were no happy-happy, life-is-fantastic moments to feel great about. I can’t imagine anyone leaving the theatre in a gleeful skip. But the plot was engrossing, the texture raw. Best of all, there is Smith. I still remember the Fresh Prince’s blockbuster debut in Independence Day 13 years ago. He was very good in what goes down as an unremarkable film, but predictable. Every emotion came at your like a sledgehammer. There was nothing delicate or sly. Just blunt. Now, with time, Will Smith has developed into one of America’s best actors. I’m not saying he’s Redford, but the guy wears pain, fatigue, hurt as well as any thespian out there. He’s no longer merely the smooth, fun-loving guy from Hitch (a truly bad movie). He’s found his chops, and they’re legit.

I’m babbling. If you haven’t seen Seven Pounds, see it. And if you have, and disagree with me, lemme know why. Because I’m at a loss.

On the long drive home from upstate, I made a partial list (Would love to hear yours—as long as it doesn’t include, “The writing of Jeff Pearlman”):

People who wear sunglasses indoors. Indianapolis. Egg beaters. Cell phones at the dinner table. Ball hogs. Traffic. Long lines. Littering. Thoughtless e-mails. Shoveling the driveway. Fine Young Cannibals. Steve Winwood. Gnat swarms. The name “Jason.” Irrational sports fans. The hair that grows on the back of my neck. Anchovies. Olympic gymnastics. Youth sports coaches (the crazy ones). Beige. The movie “AI.” Right-wing Republicanism. Stuart Scott and Chris Berman (not the men, just their acts). Writers who think our jobs are important. The adjective “courageous” to describe a novel. Being edited. Jessica Simpson, her sister and her father. Most reality TV. When I do a radio interview to promote a book and the host begins by saying, “Joe, I haven’t read the book, but …” Being a hypochondriac. My mother’s homemade lasagna. The majority of cats. Public bathrooms. Water glasses with lipstick stains. Mitt Romney. “Maneater” by Hall & Oates. The Richard Todd Era of Jets football. Sticky floors.

Haven’t been able to update the past few days, because the family and I are on vacation way up north in Long Lake, N.Y.

But I will, quickly, address one thing: The holier-than-thou-bullshit charges many fired after my latest Bonds post.

Believe me, I understand the sentiment. I really do. What I don’t understand, however, is this continued acceptance of cheating. Someone mentioned that I clearly have a vandetta against Barry Bonds. Sooooo not true: I have a vandetta against the steroid era; about ballplayers who cheated, knowingly, to enhance their careers.

I’ve written this before, but it holds true: I consider Sal Fasano, the longtime journeyman catcher, to be a good friend. I believe him, 100 percent, when he says he never used PED. Right now, at age 37, Sal is slumming in Triple A with 19-, 20-, 21-year-old kids, stopping off at Pizza Hut or Burger King en route to some half-filled stadium. While he loves the game, that’s not his motivation. His motivation is to provide for him family, to reach his maximum pension and to continue to receive the health care professional baseball offers, which affords him the best care for his ill son.

If Sal never used, and others catches have (which we know to be true: Zaun, LoDuca, Pratt, etc …), it is more than a mere “part of the game.” It’s semi-criminal: Using an illegal drug to boost your own status at the expense of another.

I just don’t understand the thinking here. Yeah, guys took shortcuts in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. But this is the era I’ve covered, and a longstanding pattern of cheating doesn’t make it right.

Yeah, maybe I am holier than thou. But the phrasing itself sort of implies that I’ve decided to take similarly evil steps in my own life, and now I’m condeming others. Not true: I don’t plagerize. I don’t ask better writers to do my work. I don’t swap bylines with Buster Olney or Jonathan Eig. I try my best, and if my best isn’t good enough, I accept it and either try harder, or move on.

Word.

PS: And as for the Rocker comment (see comments), John knew the entire time that we were doing an interview. He told me things off the record that I never used, thus implying that he was aware everything else was on the record.